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International Journal of Science Education
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For Peer Review Only
researchers did not have to deduce these levels, since they were self-estimated by the student him or herself, 
and indicated explicitly following the indicated protocol. Therefore, the percentage of agreement was 
practically 100%. 
Table 6 lists the frequencies of the students' self-estimated levels of learning in each one of the proposal's 
activities. In all the activities, the number of students who ended by understanding the content [Level II or III] 
was majority. Also noteworthy was the large percentage of students who needed the whole-class session to 
understand that content [Level II], reflecting the importance of the discussions and whole-class sessions as 
essential elements in the students' self-regulation of their learning. The following are some fragments of the 
commentaries and reflections in the students' notebooks: 
Level I: "[…] In class, speaking about this activity, there were times when I have not been able to give an 
opinion, since I did not know what was being talked about, and I was lost. […] The truth is that I still do not 
understand the activity well, although I hope that doing the next ones I can manage to understand it, because 
that has happened to me with other activities." [Student evaluates her learning in the activity A.9.] 
Level II: "This activity has been hard for me to understand because I did not know the reason behind it; I 
supposed that it was because of the sign of the charge. My hypothesis was more or less OK, like that of Laura. 
My teacher asked me to explain my theory aloud […]. Now that we have finished the whole-class session, I 
understand it fine." [Student evaluates his learning in the activity A.12.] 
Level III: "I did not found any difficulty in this activity, since we studied it recently and I believe that I have 
assimilated OK the concepts of atom and the particles that make it up. I have observed that during the class, 
doing this activity, nobody or almost nobody asked anything about it […]." [Student evaluates her learning in the 
activity A.2.] 
We would also emphasize the coherence that we found between the difficulties that the students 
themselves said they had had during the teaching-learning process, and their levels of knowledge as recorded 
by the researchers at the end of that process. We observed that the activities in which the students stated they 
had found the greatest obstacles and difficulties in understanding were those that dealt with the aspects of the 
subject that presented the lowest levels of knowledge in the test and the interviews. In particular, these 
activities were those referring to the behaviour of a semiconductor with temperature [A.7, A.8, A.9], to the 
concept of hole [A.11], and to the electrical state of a doped semiconductor [A.18]. These activities were those 
with the highest percentage of Level I learning, i.e., those that presented the greatest learning obstacles for 
the students in the sense that the greatest number of them stated that they had not understood the content 
even after the whole-class session. 
This shows the utility of self-regulation processes for triangulating the evaluation of the students' learning, 
especially in classroom research situations such as the present case. 
 
Table 6. Frequency of the students' self-estimated levels of learning for each of the activities as part of the self-regulation 
process. 
Self-estimated level of learning
Content studied
Activities
Level I (%) 
Level II (%) 
Level III (%) 
Importance of 
semiconductors in 
electronics
A.1 
14.3 
33.3 
52.4 
A.2 
13.8 
31.7 
50.0 
A.3 
13.3 
21.7 
65.0 
A.4 
11.7 
38.3 
50.0 
Concept of 
semiconductor 
Internal structure of 
an intrinsic 
semiconductor 
A.5 
10.0 
33.3 
56.7 
A.6 
15.0 
33.3 
51.7 
Electrical behaviour 
of semiconductors 
Generation and 
A.7 
40.0 
41.7 
18.3